WebSphere DataPower Gateway is really beneficial if you are trying to integrate two or more systems. It provides you with comfort and peace of mind by creating a DMZ zone for the services which are going out of the intranet to hit external clients APIs. It is greatly recommended if you have a very high volume service or API which is being used by a majority of clients because it has a dedicated physical box present which takes care of memory, CPU and all such stuff. So, all your transactions happen at wire-speed.
Mashery is great when it comes to deployment to your own datacenter and when it comes to managing third party API's like Salesforce using Mashery Cloud version. I would be a little bit more careful when deploying it on Kubernetes as it was not designed for it. New version 5 is re-architected to run more on natively on Kubernetes, but we have not tested it yet.
The most obvious thing that DataPower does exceptionally well is security. All the built-in supported security capabilities allow us to isolate most security tasks to DataPower and as a result "protect" down steam services/systems to have to deal with security.
DataPower is very good at protocol conversion and as it is usually used on the edge allows you to narrow down the protocols used between the companies public and private networks.
The appliance concept makes maintenance, recovery and, management so much simpler.
The old interface is being really missed by our team as the new WebUI interface is not that intuitive or easy to work with. It takes a lot of time to load. There should be an inbuilt wizard for creating a Rest service as well like there is for an XML based service.
IBM support is very knowledgeable but it's not that easy to reach them. They don't release the fix patches very soon which also becomes a big issue in certain situations where critical projects are involved.
Lastly, DataPower has its steep learning curve and it requires time and effort on your end to gain full control and make the most of the advanced features which it offers. Finding the right resource in the market is not that easy.
The "Control Center" admin dashboard is not performant. We have a lot of configuration data in Mashery (many endpoints, many plans, many users, many keys, etc.) and the website struggles with the volume of data it has to deal with.
Their systems have limitations that make it more difficult for us to operate the way we would like. For example, there is a limit to the number of API Definitions we can create, as well as a limit to the number of Endpoints we can define in a Plan.
Their support organization leaves a lot to be desired. Responses are slow, and when they do come they are often inadequate. We have to re-phrase the question to get them to answer it differently, or we have to repeatedly follow up to ask for additional clarifying information.
i find some of the package adding and key are complex . UI experience is bad . Every step need front and backward navigation too much. It would be better if endpoint itself contain package and key addiction option
I've really only looked at Mashery since it has been around a very long time and has a rich feature set. I do know our platform teams are looking into AWS gateway but not sure this product has everything we need.
It has really taken our business to the next level. We have expanded and integrated with so many new vendors and for all those integrations DataPower is serving as our security gateway.
We don't have to depend on any other tool for doing the load balancing of the incoming requests as that is also taken care inside the WebSphere DataPower Gateway box itself, thereby distributing the load equally.
It has made our platform much more secure, uniform and robust to deal with any kind of incoming message format or threat as well due to its latest security mechanisms and huge processing power.
As a API Mediation layer it has helped with the troublesome port setup with internal and external clients. Meaning it made that easy to the client that they know where to go for access to an API.
The interactive documentation is very well put together and has reduced the time that developers have to go back and forth with each other to figure how to call the API.
